matt czuchry

Accepting that I have been inundating this site a bit heavily with my “must sees” and “strongly recommends”, I stand by this one as hands down the Best New Drama of the season. A new release this past September, “The Good Wife” is a spin on the classic lawyer/practice approach. There’s no dancing babies in this one- sorry Ally- and more akin to real trials where most of the work is done behind the scenes rather than in the courtroom, this new show doesn’t depend on CGI gimmicks or melodramatic, blood-drenched crime scenes. Instead, this drama is all about just that: the true-to-life difficulties faced by families in crisis and by lawyers today.

Often acclaimed as a “story straight from the pages of today’s headlines,” “The Good Wife” is the story of Alicia Florrick played to perfection by the long-hidden-away-in-hiatus Julianna Margulies (of “E.R.”), as a wife of a politician- “Sex and the City’s” Chris Noth- who is forced back to work to support her two children as her husband is sent to jail for all things drugs, sex and lies related. Opening to a scene we’ve seen all too many times these days under the thunderous flash of newspaper bulbs, the Florricks take the stage as hubby makes one final speech alongside his faithful wife before he’s hauled off to the big house. In this singular scene of cinematic grace and omniscience, we get to see what this awful scene is like from the oft-ignored point of view of the lied-to and pained wife: the ultimate modern Persephone and Hades gothic pose of devotion and hatred. The sequence is brilliance and sets the scene perfectly for the ingenious drama that unfolds from there.